Freckelton Ian
Barrister, Castan Chambers, Melbourne; Professorial Fellow of Law and Psychiatry, University of Melbourne; Adjunct Professor of Forensic Medicine, Monash University; Adjunct Professor, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
J Law Med. 2020 Aug;27(4):779-789.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an environment highly conducive to substandard and fraudulent research. The incentives and temptations for the unethical are substantial. The articles published during 2020 in The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine that were based on spurious datasets, allegedly hosted by a cloud-based health care analytics platform, are deeply confronting for research integrity. They illustrate the perils of precipitate publication, inadequate peer-reviewing and co-authorship without proper assumption of responsibility. A period of crisis such as that in existence during the COVID-19 pandemic calls for high-quality research that is robustly evaluated. It is not a time for panic to propel premature publication or for relaxation in scholarly standards. Any other approach will replicate errors of the past and result in illusory research breakthroughs to global detriment.
新冠疫情营造了一个极有利于不合格及欺诈性研究的环境。不道德行为面临的激励因素和诱惑相当大。2020年发表在《柳叶刀》和《新英格兰医学杂志》上的一些文章，所依据的是虚假数据集，据称这些数据集由一个基于云的医疗分析平台托管，这对研究诚信构成了严峻挑战。它们说明了仓促发表、同行评审不足以及共同署名却未适当承担责任的危害。像新冠疫情期间这样的危机时刻，需要高质量且经过严格评估的研究。这不是因恐慌而推动过早发表的时候，也不是放松学术标准的时候。任何其他做法都会重蹈过去的错误，导致虚假的研究突破，对全球造成损害。
